About Us

Before immigration, I spent my career in business development and business management, building brands for other companies. That work teaches you one thing quickly. Every brand has a genesis. Without it you do not have a brand, you have a logo and a price list.

So when it came to building my own, I knew which question had to be answered first. Where does this come from? Not a market gap. Not a business plan. My kids. That is the genesis of this company, and everything else is built on top of it.

My own name

Dikshit comes from the Sanskrit word diksha, which means instruction, or being initiated into knowledge. A Dikshit is someone who receives that knowledge and then passes it on. It runs both ways. Learning it is only half the job. The other half is teaching it to whoever needs it.

I did not choose the name, but it has shaped how I practise. It is the reason so much of this site is knowledge rather than sales. A good deal of immigration work can be handled by the applicant without representation, and where that is the case I would rather hand someone the information and let them get on with it. What I know is not much use sitting with me.

That is not just a turn of phrase. I mentor new consultants through the College of Immigration and Citizenship Consultants mentorship programme, working with people preparing to practise before they take on their first file, and I continue to do it. The standard of advice people receive in this profession depends on how the next generation is trained.

The standard I hold myself to

I want my kids to be proud of what I do. I also want to be a good advisor. Those turn out to be the same job.

Sometimes that answer is hard to hear. Immigration law is complicated and the stakes are real. People spend years and their savings on applications that were never going to work. If your case has a problem, you are better off hearing it from me now than finding out from IRCC in eighteen months. So I say it early, while you can still do something about it.

What we mean by integrity and competence

Integrity is paramount here, but on its own it is not enough, because meaning well and getting it right are two different things. Competence is knowing what to do, which provision applies, what the officer is going to look for and where the evidence in front of you is thin. Integrity is what you do with that knowledge when nobody is checking your work. A consultant who is honest but out of his depth may still sink a file, and one who knows the law well but uses it to keep a client rather than to help them is worse.

The way I think about it there is an order to it. First you learn what to do, then you do it confidently, and that confidence is only worth something if it came out of the learning rather than out of a good manner. Then you do it for the right reasons, which usually means telling someone their case is weak when a more encouraging answer would have kept them as a client. And if those three hold you end up enjoying the work, which is what stops the standard slipping quietly over twenty years. We try to bring all four together. Nobody holds all of them at once all of the time, and most of the job is noticing when one has slipped and pulling it back.

Always a student

Immigration law does not sit still. Instructions change, categories open and close, and decisions come down that quietly change how a provision is read, so keeping pace with a changing situation is part of the work rather than something done when there is spare time left over. That is why the guides on this site get updated, why the processing times pull themselves from IRCC, and why I mentor consultants coming into the profession through the CICC programme. Teaching keeps you honest about what you actually know, in a way that quiet practice on your own does not.

The yardstick we work to

The measure of a year here is not the number of files opened. It is how many people ended up better placed than they were when they reached us, and that includes the ones we did not take on, because there was nothing worth filing yet, or the timing was wrong, or the matter belonged with someone else. None of those conversations show up in a count of retainers, but they are the part of the work I would want counted.

The standard behind that is simple to state and harder to keep. Learn the thing properly before claiming it, do it well enough to be sure of yourself and check yourself anyway, and do it because it is right rather than because someone is watching. That applies to a straightforward study permit in the same way it applies to a refused file heading for the Federal Court, and it is what I expect of anyone who works on a file under this name.

What we promise

• We tell you what the law says, not what you were hoping to hear.
• Every answer we give can be traced back to a rule, a policy or a decision.
• If we would not advise our own family to do it, we will not advise you to do it.
• If we cannot help you, we will say so, and tell you why.
• We teach as much as we can, for free. The guides, tools and calculators on this site exist so you can understand your own situation without paying anyone first.